Gale-force good guy

Daniel Bedingfield is an unlikely pop star - he's polite, adores his parents and is a committed Christian. But he's also one of the most distinctive talents of recent years, writes Neil McCormick

Energy: Daniel Bedingfield

Daniel Bedingfield

12:01AM GMT 06 Mar 2003

You might think Daniel Bedingfield is a bit, well, cheesy for this column. Certainly his recent number-one ballad, If You're Not the One, is not the kind of thing I usually champion: all syrupy sentiment, stirring melody and gloopy strings, like something Andrew Lloyd Webber might come up with if he was writing for a boy band.

Well, for the record, I think Bedingfield is a copiously talented singer-songwriter. Although he works in an ultra-commercial vein that does not always attract critical approval, I believe he is one of the most distinctive and accomplished new talents to have emerged in this country in recent years. He sings beautifully, exhibiting the nuance and control of top American R&B crooners crossed with the earthier tonal character of such UK stalwarts as Sting or David Gray.

A versatile multi-instrumentalist, he pretty much programmed and performed everything on his surprisingly diverse debut album, Gotta Get Thru This (Polydor), himself. And he writes really top-drawer pop songs, certainly more lyrically involving and musically ambitious than most of the cliched drivel supplied by songwriting hacks to the nation's manufactured pop kids. While the record industry turned to TV talent shows to find the heir to Robbie Williams, Bedingfield sprang to fame last year with a number-one single he wrote and recorded in his own bedroom, which makes him a hero in my book.

But I have to be honest here. My first reaction on meeting this paragon was that I wanted to smack him. He came bounding down the stairs of his grand hotel suite with the ungainliness of a big puppy, eagerly thrusting his hand out as if the opportunity to greet a representative of The Daily Telegraph was a dream he had cherished all his young life.

His introductory comments were punctuated with a few too many whoops and yeahs and other exclamatory phrases generally unsuited to a polite English accent. Asked by his press officer if he wanted anything, he declared, "Yeah! A couple of big fat lines of cocaine! Wooh!" then laughed loudly to show that this was his idea of a joke.

"That's what I'm supposed to be doing by now, isn't it? But I can tell you that is never going to happen," he said, suddenly as sincere as a boy scout showing off his merit badges. "Drugs are not for me. I've never been interested and I never will."

I did not know whether I was supposed to pat him on the back or smile wearily and say: "Get back to me in 10 years, kid." Unusually for an urban pop star raised on the streets of Brixton, Bedingfield manages to come across as younger than his 22 years. He has an air of bountiful enthusiasm and qualities of old-world good manners that would not be out of place in an Enid Blyton novel.

His swear word of choice is "frigging", which is not really a swear word at all. He loves his parents, whose virtues he copiously extols. He is a committed Christian, whose sense of divine mission underpins his craft. He is like a gale-force version of Cliff Richard, all good intentions and holy spirit.

"I want to write songs that become part of the heritage," he breathlessly proclaims. "I want to write songs that people fall in love to, play at their wedding or their funeral, that help them get through a difficult patch or give them the best summer they've ever had. I want to make a valuable contribution to society."

At this point, one might cue up Gotta Get Thru This, his breakthrough hit that was all but inescapable last summer, featuring percolating garage beats and a speeded-up vocal repeating the title phrase ad infinitum. While indisputably a catchy single, its social value is not immediately apparent. Bedingfield, however, recounts an inspirational tale of how it helped a young cancer victim and her family during their darkest hours.

"They were totally hopeless, not knowing what to do, when the song came on the radio and the mum started singing it. She really spoke it forth, like in old scriptures where the words themselves have power and they shoot, like, living bolts of energy into someone's soul and it gave her daughter hope and she grasped it, and the family took hold of this song and it became their strength. I loved it when they told me that. It is just so epic!

"I see music as such a powerful force, almost capable of breathing life into someone. Or you can breath death into someone, you can poison minds as many musicians do, by speaking hopelessness into the lives of teenagers. I believe you're able to stimulate the soul through music and I want to use that power for good."

While Bedingfield's effusiveness can be a touch overbearing, his idealism is hard to fault. So, yes, I admit it, after a while even this old cynic began to warm towards him. He genuinely cares about things, speaks eloquently and appears to have the courage of convictions deeply rooted in his background.

His parents are social workers heavily involved in charitable concerns, who set up a community school in Brixton. He says of their Christian values that "I could not do anything but embrace them because I've seen them work and I'm a big fan of stuff that works".

Music was always part of family life, and he found his initial instinct for melody and lyrics (his biggest musical hero, unpredictably, is Bob Dylan) being coloured by the polyrhythmic influences of his multicultural neighbourhood. ("It's got to have a phat beat!" he declares in hip hop slang. "I don't think my Brixton friends could listen to a Bob Dylan album all the way through!")

He says songwriting came naturally. "By the time I was 13, I knew that, if you had a particular ache or terrible situation you were going through, you could alleviate it very quickly by writing a song. And, if I was incredibly excited about something, it was the only way to dissipate that kind of tension, to shout out my happiness.

"Songs are like vessels for moments in time, they carry with them the feeling of what happened better even than a photograph or a video. There is a spiritual quality to the creation of a song."

His album displays a genuinely impressive musical range, spanning the chunky power-pop of his forthcoming single I Can't Read You, the gorgeous urban harmonising of Without the Girl, the elegantly structured, richly melodic spiritual epic Honest Questions. And, of course, there's If You're Not the One.

"It is a bit cheesy, isn't it?" he volunteers. Then he makes the surprisingly pragmatic admission that he started writing pop songs only when he realised his more complex material (of which Honest Questions is an example) was unlikely to win him a deal.

"Commercialism, sappy lyrics and meek tunes are the things I hate most in the universe, but I'm not sure even Bob Dylan could get record company interest without hooks these days. It's a different age. You need to go some kind of populist route. So, about three years ago, I sat down with a Westlife song and tried to write something similar. To get on in life, I had to embrace my cheesy side."